Google sent November earnings payments to AdSense publishers in Australia amd New Zealand with one major error… the currency exchange rate was inverted. So publishers ended up with less earnings that they should have, although fortunately because of the exchange rate, most were only shorted by a few hundred dollars, instead of the potential for thousands of dollars for other currencies with exchange rates not nearly as close to par.

Hi all,
Our payments team asked me to let you know that they’re aware of this conversion issue with AU currency payments, and will be contacting affected publishers shortly.

Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for the confusion.

-ASA

For those receiving payments in AU currency, the conversion shows in the AdSense account as 0.867 : 1 when it should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.15 : 1.

With any luck, Google will get on top of this and issue the difference to all affected publishers within the next few days (taking into account that it is a stat holiday in the US on Tuesday) and not making publishers wait until the following month’s payment for the difference.

FYI a fellow Aussie blogger just got this message from Google so it looks like we’ll get our missing $ within a week:

“It appears that the November payment you recently received was calculated using an inverted exchange rate.

We’d like to let you know that you’ll be receiving an additional payment using the correct exchange rate to make up the difference. This payment will be issued to your bank account this week and we expect that you’ll receive it by Monday, January 7, 2008 if not sooner”